Find the person behind a stale record

Yes, for legitimate purposes: debt recovery, service of legal documents, locating beneficiaries and similar.

Searches draw on lawfully collected data, and handling follows the Australian Privacy Principles. Access is limited to organisations with a permitted purpose, and that purpose is confirmed during account setup, not asserted at query time.

The boundary is a real one, not a formality. This data is available at this depth because it is confined to investigative and verification work, and it cannot be repurposed for marketing or general background research.

A name, plus any second detail: a last known address, a date of birth, or an old phone number.

That is deliberately a low bar, because a stale record is the normal starting position. If you already had current details you would not need to trace.

More inputs narrow the match faster. A name alone across roughly 2 billion records will return many candidates; a name with a last known suburb and an approximate age usually converges quickly. A trace that starts from a 2019 address in regional Victoria is a routine case, not a difficult one.

The details needed to make contact, each with its provenance:

• Address history, with the most recent address flagged and GNAF-verified
• Current phone and email where held, with connectivity and deliverability checked
• Linked records — property transfers and court judgements

Every returned field shows its source and the date it was last verified, so you can tell a recently confirmed address from a historical one. Address history in sequence is often more useful than the current address alone, because the movement pattern is what tells you whether a trace has genuinely landed.

Because it is the cheapest possible way to close a file correctly, and the most expensive one to skip.

Tracing effort spent on someone who has died is entirely wasted, and the outcome is worse than wasted: a successful trace leads to contact, and contact means a demand letter or a phone call reaching a grieving family.

Screening against the Australian Death Check first rules those records out before any effort is spent, and closes the file with evidence from the official state and territory registries instead of an assumption. For a recovery ledger this is usually the first pass, not an afterthought.

The consumer data universe is updated daily, and each returned field shows its source and the date it was last verified.

Phone connectivity is checked live at query time, not read from a stored status, so a number that has been disconnected since the record was built returns as disconnected. That is the answer that determines whether the trace was successful.

For a trace, recency is not a quality metric but the entire product. An address that was correct two years ago is the information you already had.

Yes. The API washes whole ledgers in one run, returning current address, contact points and deceased status per record.

The usual division of labour is to run the ledger through the API first, which resolves the majority of records automatically and identifies the ones that need attention, then work the remaining hard cases individually in Caspar where a full profile in one view is worth the time.

That sequencing matters at scale. Manually tracing a ledger that a bulk wash would have resolved in a single pass is the most common way this work becomes uneconomic.

Four broad groups, with quite different urgency:

• Debt recovery — collections stall when a debtor moves; a current address and a working number restart the file without a field call
• Legal service — service of process requires a current, verifiable address, because the documents have to reach the person
• Claims and asset work — insurers and lawyers locating policyholders, beneficiaries and witnesses years after last contact
• Lost members and estates — superannuation funds and estate administrators reuniting people with money they are owed

The last of those is worth noting, because skip tracing is often assumed to be adversarial. A significant share of it is returning money to people who do not know it exists.